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Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#291
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many good accountants will weigh the chance of you getting audited + fined against the ROI of an "oversight." "Good" is a questionable descriptor here. I would think that a good accountant should follow ethical rules, which would exclude the possibility of knowingly breaking the law to under-report taxes.

Except which accountant will get more business. a) Hey I have a cousin Vinny. Great account. Knows every single rule and is always ethical. I sleep great at night b) Hey I have a cousin Jen. Great accountant. She found all kinds of crazy savings, saved me $1000 last year. People know in their heart they should go for the honest guy. But hey, saving money.. who can pass that up?

Businesses. People who understand the risk, etc.

Knowingly and intentionally not paying a tax by falsifying records probably does not sit well with the Internal Revenue Service.

IRS can and has disbarred CPAs based on ethics [1].

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/Certified-Public-Accountant...

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#292
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can almost hear the ghost of Warren Buffet pitching Geico echoing through Bezos' prose.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tale-two-annual-letters-bezos...

Dude kind of missed the point that Bezos has clearly read a lot of Buffet's shareholder letters and is now taking on this good-natured, funny grandfather tone to soften public percpetion the hard economics that run his business - cost cutting, ruthless management, etc. that have recently come to light. Smart move, not subtle, but also not meant to be subtle.

Wouldn't be surprised if Bezos starts madly pitching for the USA and including pictures of him and his employees soon...on the other hand, nobody breaks down the business of insurance/multi-national conglomerate management as elegantly, wittily, and insightfully as Buffett so we have that to look forward to from Bezos.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#294
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Apple also sells premium accessories for their devices including headphones, cases, backpacks, other hardware accessories and even 3rd party software for their devices. They are not a general purpose store. Amazon is, or at least pretends to be.

So you are saying that if you are a general purpose store, you have to offer products from your competitors. Walmart should sell Target brand products, Home Depot should sell Lowes brand products. See my point? Stores just aren't in the business of selling their competitors products.

The problem isn't that they aren't selling it themselves, it's that they aren't letting marketplace sellers sell it.

It's like if eBay banned Kindle sales.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders

#295
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because is ad hominem, doesn't mean it's a fallacy. Sometimes a person's reputation is so bad you don't need to give any benefit of the doubt for his/her opinions.

Whether or not you turn out to be correct has no bearing on whether your reasoning was fallacious.

Most so-called fallacies are empirically effective (though not valid proofs in classical logic). Public statements from kooks really are false at a much higher rate than public statements from non-kooks.
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